The Nation; When an Original Idea Sounds Really Familiar

By JAMES ATLAS

Published: July 28, 1991

PLAGIARISM has a long and honorable tradition. Laurence Sterne drew liberally on Robert Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy" when he was writing "Tristram Shandy." Immense stretches of Coleridge's "Biographia Literaria" were cribbed from the German philosopher Friedrich Schlegel. Indeed, the history of literature, according to the Yale critic Harold Bloom, is a history of "misreading" -- his term for the kind of unconscious borrowings that enable a writer to discover his own voice.

"Weaker talents idealize," writes Mr. Bloom in "The Anxiety of Influence," while "figures of capable imagination appropriate for themselves." Or, as T. S. Eliot more bluntly put it in his essay on the Jacobean dramatist Philip Massinger: "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal."

Lately, though, this venerable tradition has encountered intense scrutiny, especially in the precincts of journalism. Two weeks ago H. Joachim Maitre, dean of Boston University's College of Education, was forced to resign after it was revealed that he had quoted in a commencement speech long passages from an article by the film critic Michael Medved -- and failed to acknowledge his source. Fox Butterfield, who reported the story for The New York Times, was disciplined for improperly relying on a Boston Globe account of the dean's plagiarism.

The Washington Post, not to be outdone in the probity department, reprimanded its Miami correspondent, Laura Parker, "for lifting substantial portions of a story on mosquitoes from three Miami Herald articles" (as the Post described her infraction). Ms. Parker left the paper saying that she had been "very harshly punished." The Globe, meanwhile, disciplined a reporter for "stealing words from the Georgia politician Julian Bond."

Who is this quotation from? Gregg Easterbrook, a contributing editor to The Atlantic and Newsweek, who found out this month that "Managing on the Edge," a book by Richard Tanner Pascale of the Stanford Business School, included three pages borrowed nearly verbatim from an article Mr. Easterbrook had published five years earlier in The Washington Monthly.

"What's it like to discover someone has stolen your words?" wrote Mr. Easterbrook in the July 29 issue of Newsweek: "My initial reaction was to feel strangely flattered that another author liked my writing well enough to pass it off as his own." That clever sentence wasn't in quotes, but Mr. Easterbrook was quick to point out that it belonged to his colleague James Fallows.

Is the sudden sensitivity to plagiarism this month's trend? An escalation of the intellectual vigilantism known in the media as political correctness? After all, it's hardly a new phenomenon. A decade ago D. M. Thomas was twice accused of plagiary: in his translation of Pushkin's poetry (from the Russian scholar Walter Arndt) and in his best-selling novel, "The White Hotel" (from Anatolii Kuznetsov's memoir of Babi Yar). 'Misreading' or Theft?

The novelist John Gardner, author of "On Moral Fiction," a thunderous Old Testament diatribe against the lapsed literary standards of his contemporaries, was himself accused of plagiarizing academic sources in a scholarly book on Chaucer. (Gardner has even suffered posthumous retribution: In the author's note to a weekly column she writes for The Bennington Banner, his ex-wife, Joan Gardner, describes herself as the "co-author" of "Grendel" and "October Light," two of Gardner's best-known novels.) Just this spring, Stephen B. Oates, a respected scholar and biographer, was accused of having plagiarized portions of his 1977 biography of Abraham Lincoln.

In the end, none of these accusations entirely discredited the authors; tried in the court of public opinion, they vehemently defended themselves and were, if not quite exonerated, more or less forgiven. (The charges against Mr. Oates were formally rebutted in a statement drafted by 22 scholars eminent in the field.) Literary plagiarism is hard to prove. When is a writer "misreading" and when is he shoplifting others' words?

What is disheartening about so much of the plagiarism in the news these days is how shabby it is, how merely expedient. These aren't literary appropriations but simply the latest manifestation of our insouciance toward the written word. It's not interesting plagiarism. It doesn't provoke us to speculate about the motives of the plagiarist, as we do in the cases of D. M. Thomas or Gardner. Were they conscious of what they had done? Did they want to get caught? It has no literary resonance.

Lance Morrow, in a Time magazine essay about the latest troubles of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, managed to smuggle in echoes of Eliot, Auden and Ralph Waldo Emerson. (William Safire noted two of them in his "On Language" column, and Mr. Morrow confessed to the third.) This is the plagiarism of the literate; the assumption is that those in the know will appreciate the allusion. It is a skill that has become increasingly rare.

But then, how could it be otherwise? The best-seller list is dominated by ghost-written books, "as-told-to" books, books written "with" instead of "by." Syndicated columnists like Evans and Novak employ "research assistants" to help write their columns; Congressmen employ speech writers. (It wasn't Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. who plundered the speeches of the British politician Neil Kinnock, an act that knocked him out of the 1988 Presidential campaign; it was his speech writer.)

"From politicians to business leaders, judges to sports figures, our public discourse is carried forward on the backs of a battalion of scribes," declared Ari Posner in a 1988 New Republic cover story entitled "The Culture of Plagiarism." Promiscuous Pilferage

In this climate of verbal promiscuity, pilfering a few phrases here and there doesn't even qualify as a misdemeanor. Writers are no more immune than anyone else to the temptation to cut corners.

The new technology has made it easy for them to be lazy. What difference does it make where I got the information? Who's going to know? Inundated with faxes and Xeroxes, computerized data bases and information banks, how can anyone even remember who their sources are? How can they absorb it all? Who has the moral character to resist?

The pressure to produce, long a feature of academic life ("publish or perish"), is increasingly felt by journalists, historians and biographers. "There's a general feeling among us that we have to turn out a lot of stuff," says Geoffrey C. Ward, a biographer of Franklin D. Roosevelt. "Most of the books I'm asked to review are just a rearrangement of the same facts, asserted as facts because they're in other books."

Rearranging material that has already appeared in print isn't necessarily plagiarism; often it's the only material there is.

"The law recognizes that any two biographies of the same subject will by necessity have similarities in facts, sequence, themes and theories," Professor Oates told Edwin McDowell, a reporter for The New York Times. So will any two newspaper articles on the same event. But that doesn't mean you can use someone else's reporting and not say you did.

"No, it isn't murder," concedes the writer Thomas Mallon, "and as larceny goes it's usually more distasteful than good. But it is a bad thing."

You said it, Tom. Or rather, you wrote it. On page xi of the preface to "Stolen Words: Forays into the Origins and Ravages of Plagiarism," the definitive book on the subject (and source for that allusion to Laurence Sterne).